June 30 (Reuters) – TikTok has agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by a teenager who claimed the platform damaged his mental health, a spokesperson for the plaintiff’s law firm said Tuesday.
The settlement was reached in principle, but the details have not yet been finalized, according to a spokesperson for Morgan & Morgan, which represents the plaintiff, a 15-year-old boy from Florida known by his initials R.K.C.
TikTok representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
R.K.C.’s case is expected to be the second trial in California state court over claims social media platforms have been designed to be addictive to children, spurring a youth mental health crisis.
R.K.C., who started using social media when he was about 8, said he became addicted to it, losing sleep and suffering from depression and anxiety, according to court filings.
He originally named four defendants in his lawsuit — Google’s YouTube, Meta’s Instagram, Snap Inc’s Snapchat and ByteDance’s TikTok. YouTube settled in June, while Meta and Snapchat remain scheduled for a trial set to kick off July 27.
THOUSANDS OF CASES
More than 3,300 lawsuits involving addiction claims against social media companies are pending in California state court. Another 2,600 cases brought by individuals, school districts, municipalities and states are pending in California federal court.
The companies have denied the allegations and say they take extensive steps to keep teens and young users safe on their platforms.
The first trial, which ended in March, was in the case of a woman who said she became addicted to social media platforms at a young age because of their attention-grabbing design. TikTok and Snap settled that case before trial.
Meta and Google went to trial, and a jury ultimately found the companies negligent, ordering Meta to pay $4.2 million in damages and Google to pay $1.8 million. In June, the judge rejected the companies’ bid to set aside that verdict.
The first trial in federal court had been set to begin in June in a lawsuit brought by a Kentucky school district against Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube. All of the companies settled before trial, paying the district a combined $27 million.
In addition to the cases in Los Angeles and in federal court, nearly every state in the country has filed lawsuits in their own states against the companies. The lawsuits accuse the companies of misrepresenting the safety of their platforms for young users and of designing them to addict children.
(Reporting by Diana Novak Jones; Editing by Franklin Paul, Alexia Garamfalvi and Jamie Freed)